We've all had that moment. When you're young and you visit a friends home and you realise that not everyone grows up in the same environment. What happens inside your home is different from other people. I had a good friend in primary and high school who lived in a house with a pool table and swimming pool. They had an atari and a tupperware container in their pantry filled with lollies. They invited friends for sleepovers and had take away food for dinner sometimes. This seemed like the opposite of our house.
Dad worked shift work so we had to be quiet as he'd sometimes be sleeping during the day. The only visitors to our home was friends of Mum and Dad, invited for dinner occasionally. It never felt like a house where our childhood friends were welcomed. But I didn't really notice it, as this was just how it was.
I grew up knowing that my Mum's mother (my grandmother) was an awful person. She was physically and verbally abusive to my Mum. She beat her, and belittled her. Even once in front of a friend who had come home with Mum after school. On witnessing the violence, the friend ran terrified from the house. Mum was met with sympathetic looks from the women who lived in the street, guessing people knew what happened in their home. I always thought of my grandmother as a terrible person. But since Dad died in 2012, when I visit Mum we spend time talking about her past. I have found more out about my grandmother that makes me see her in a different light. Not simply a menacing evil presence, but as someone incredibly mentally unwell in a time where people lived undiagnosed. Mum told me once when she was little that she and her younger brother were marched out of the house during the night by their Mum and all three went to hide in the local woods in the dark. Her Mum hoped to scare her husband into thinking something terrible had happened to them when he arived home to an empty house. My Mum loved her Dad, but I have never heard her say he intervened or stopped the abuse. Mum has said recently that she thinks he may have had other relationships, which seemed like a bombshell. Her love for him was deep and I pictured him as her liferaft in surviving childhood. Her brother was never on the receiving end of the abuse, it was only Mum who suffered the wrath of my grandmother. Mum married young and emigrated to Australia from England with her husband when she was in her early 20s. It comes as no surprised why she would be happy to leave and move as far away as possible from her mother. She arrived in Melbourne and built a life with David. She had my two brothers but was tragically widowed in her 30s when David had a massive heart attack. She had little support and survived on a widow's pension supplemented by cleaning jobs. She had lost her soul mate, and was looking after two young sons both aged under 10. She eventually remarried and had me.
The other person we talk about is my Dad. I've written many times about the complex relationship I had with him. His anger sometimes roared through our home. We all coped by being quiet and waiting for it to pass. Keep your head down. Don't say anything. Mum said she was watching something on the tv recently which stopped her in her tracks. They were talking about coercive control. As they ran through the list of traits, she ticked many of them off, seeing her relationship with Dad. She told me recently how charming he was when they met. Loving, considerate, someone who wooed her. This was not the man we had grown up with, an it was hard to reconcile these words with my Dad. He was supportive and baby sat my brothers so Mum could do a course at night. He asked her repeatedly to marry him until one day she finally said yes. Once they were married things changed. He didn't want her to work. He controlled the household money and only gave Mum enough for shopping and bills. She didn't have a car of her own and was stuck in the suburbs with a bus as the only public transport. Mum told me recently that there was a time when I was little and was so sick with asthma and she had no way to get to the doctors as Dad had the car. The bus didn't go in that direction and taxis were unheard of in our lives. She was forced to walk me the couple of kilometres to the doctors, knowing I was really sick. She felt so awful, seeing how ill I was. She hoped this would make Dad see she needed a car. They went looking at something for Mum to drive, but Dad never followed through. It was like the conversation never happened and it was never spoken of again. He also put Mum down and belittled her. Once right before we were all due to go out to celebrate her milestone birthday. Surrounded by family and friends at a restaurant, she spent the night quietly holding back tears. He threatened that if she ever tried to leave she would get nothing. None of his money or superannuation. She would be forced to try to raise three children on her own unsupported. My eldest brother is ten years older than me. Mum said she was standing in the kitchen with him once, while he was drinking a glass of water. On hearing Dad's car arriving home in the driveway, he shattered the glass in his hand. He left home at 18, following in Mum's footsteps as she left home young to escape a parent. When Mum confronted Dad one day about why he was so hard and negative about us and other people, he asked her why she thought he did it. 'To make yourself feel better than other people by putting them down' she replied. She had hit the nail on the head.
During lockdown I watched Jess Hill's series "See what you made me do" and then read her Stella prize winning book. I guess I needed to understand the issues of control and abuse and see how it related to our home. Dad was never violent and compared to the stories of abuse in the book and series it seems weird to even say this out loud. He certainly didn't tick all the checklist. But it has made me consider the impact of growing up in this environment. I have long wondered why my default setting is never feeling good enough. Why doing well at uni seems like such a surprise and hard to reconcile with how I see myself. Why confrontation is so incredibly hard for me, and why being near someone else's anger makes me shut down. Do I need to talk to someone to confirm and understand the root cause of these feelings in myself? No. Has it helped me look back and see my own childhood through a different prism? Yes.
I was talking to a friend recently about this. I said how different my eldest brother and I are. And in explaining the difference to her I realised we are both expressing the need for validation in a different way. His manifests externally, talking of top brands, the cost of things, power in business. Hilariously, all these things are an anathema to me. But I realise that these represent validation. While I have grown up so critical of myself, internalising that need for validation and considering success as always beyond me. I know this feeling at my core is true, because as I write this I am shaking and in tears.
Distance allows us to stop and look back. See things in a different way. Add depth and understanding to our own experience. Give history a new perspective. It has also given me new words to describe my own childhood and my Mum's experience growing up. It makes me appreciate what a survivor my Mum is, and how amazing it is that she has remained a beacon of love in spite of all she has experienced. Perhaps the words for childhood impact who we are, but don't have to define us as adults.
Comments